27 hot leads in 9 days for $509

On 1 October our new outreach started. Nine days later it had reached 9,416 people. 121 wrote back, and 27 of them are hot leads. It cost $509 in total, so $18.86 per hot lead.

"Hot lead" is the tool's own label, so I read all 27 myself. 16 said yes: they asked for ideas, an example or a call. 7 said later, 6 of them because of timing, like an ERP migration or a budget that's already closed. 4 were the wrong person or passed it on. Counted per real yes, it's $31.83.

One of the replies:

One of the agents did write it.

The setup has three parts.

The outreach runs on Explee. You give it your website, and it finds the people, researches each company, writes every email in the lead's own language and sends it from its own inboxes. You pay about $0.04 per email.

Claude handles the replies. Every 10 minutes our server checks the Explee API for new replies. Claude reads each one, works out what the person asked for and drafts my answer. If they want a call, it offers two free times from my calendar.

Then I approve. The draft lands in Slack with three buttons: Send, Edit in Gmail and Don't send. Nothing goes out without my click. After I send, our CRM updates the deal and a LinkedIn connection request goes out.

Two settings I'd copy:

• Let it write in the lead's own language. 16 of our 27 hot leads got an email that wasn't in English. Our earlier English-only campaigns in another tool got 4 positive replies from about 14,200 emails.

• Keep the ask small. Every email ends with something like "Want me to send you two concrete ideas?" Saying yes to that costs the reader nothing.

We now use the same setup at No Hands Labs, where we start new companies. Every new offer gets its own campaign, and within days the replies tell us if the message lands.

I wrote the full setup down: the numbers per campaign, six real replies, the Claude prompt we use for the answers, and a Claude Code prompt to build the reply flow yourself: gtm.arcgent.ai

If you want to try Explee, you start with $30 in credits, which is about 750 emails: start with Explee. It's an affiliate link, so I get a commission if you sign up. The numbers above are ours either way.

Robin

PS: At Arcgent we make companies AI-native one process at a time. We map and score your processes, plan the order, then build and run them. If you want to know where your company would start, book a 30-minute call.